moreutils is a growing collection of the unix tools that nobody thought
to write long ago when unix was young, including amongst others:

chronic: run a command, hide output unless it fails
lckdo: execute a program with a lock held
mispipe: pipe two commands, returning the exit status of the first
pee: tee standard input to pipes
sponge: soak up standard input and write to a file
ts: timestamp standard input
vidir: edit a directory in your text editor
vipe: insert a text editor into a pipe
zrun: automatically uncompress arguments to command
